The Aquos Phone SH930W slightly rethinks the internals of HTC’s new Android 4.1 flagship to make it more affordable, doubling the non-expandable storage to 32GB but scaling back to a dual-core, 1.5GHz Snapdragon S3 and dropping the currently unsupported LTE.

That cost-cutting will be vital, as the SH930W is headed to a more price-sensitive Russia first, in late November – one of the few (if not only) times that Sharp has tailored a smartphone to a country other than its native Japan. The 22,000-ruble ($694) off-contract price in Russia could undercut mere 720p rivals that often cost 25,000 rubles ($789) or more.

Mobile-review was curious enough to snag a pre-release SH930W for an early inspection. While the device under the microscope was running vanilla Android rather than the planned Feel UX and may easily have a fair share of buggy code, initial benchmarks seem to validate fears of a mismatch between the display and an underpowered chip : the Galaxy S3 is fast enough for common tasks at that resolution, but chokes with playing 1080p video and certain 3D games. Anyone buying the extra-large Aquos Phone will mostly be choosing it for the good battery life, the camera and that killer price, the site says.

In a related posts, we’ve mentioned earlier today, that samsung is also working on a 1080p Super AMOLED display smartphone according to the rumor.

We’ve heard already the rumor of a 1080p Super AMOLED display from Samsung, but the new chatter adds more details to the story – a 4.99-inch Super AMOLED display with 1080p resolution and a staggering 441ppi pixel density.

The first phones to use a 5-inch 1080p display are already available in some markets, but they rely on LCDs. The new display from Samsung is, of course, rumored to be used in the Galaxy S IV. What the gossip doesn’t say is whether the display will use a PenTile or an RGB matrix. At this pixel density it might not make much difference but we’ll see.

Anyway, the 5-inch 1080p Super AMOLEDs will supposedly go into production in Q1 of next year. This would be just in time for a Q2 launch (all three Galaxy S flagships launched in Q2).

Whether this rumor pans out or not, 2013 will be the year of 5-inch 1080p screens. HTC already started and so did Sharp, Sony (through Japan Display Inc) and LG are also reportedly working on smartphones with such units.